Meatball Meatball

[stoutfellow]

I'm back to cooking for myself (as opposed to warming up frozen meals). Last week, I made another batch of the minestrone "casserole"; I'd hoped for six or seven helpings, but it only lasted five. Yesterday, I decided to try a new recipe, for Italian meatball soup. It looked simple enough - only six ingredients, and "mix everything but the cheese in the slow cooker and cook it for nine hours" - but minor difficulties appeared. The recipe called for a 19 oz can of white kidney beans, but SnS only had them in 15 and 29 oz cans, so I went with the smaller size. It also called for a pound of frozen cooked Italian meatballs, but I couldn't find any, so instead I picked up a pound of raw ground Italian sausage. Finally, it rained intermittently yesterday morning, so by the time I was able to buy the ingredients, it was too late to start the cooker.

So... this morning, I dumped the ground sausage into my small frying pan and sauteed it until the pink went away, then mixed it with the rest of the ingredients and set it to cooking. I just had the first helping, along with a spinach salad (not much in the way of veggies in the soup); it was pretty tasty, and a little on the hot side. I'm not sure it'll last me all week, but it should get me through Thursday at least.

(I'm also being conscientious about upping my fruit consumption - a sack of d'Anjou pears last week, Braeburn apples this week. I'll probably put navel oranges into the rotation as well, with bananas and peaches as outside contenders.)

Comments

[mmegaera]

Do you have a farmers' market within a reasonable bus ride? That's where I get a much wider variety of fruit in the summer than is available at local supermarkets.

[stoutfellow]

Thanks for raising the question. Apparently there is one downtown, which I was unaware of because it's Saturdays only - and I'm rarely downtown on Saturday. I'll have to check it out.

[mmegaera]

Here's hoping they have lots of goodies. I picked up asparagus and the first local strawberries (orders of *magnitude* better than those horrible California berries) yesterday. We'll have cherries in a week or two.